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Dessert

Boiled Indian Pudding

A sweet pudding made from milk, cornmeal, flour, suet, molasses, salt, and eggs, boiled for three hours.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Milk and flour are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 14% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 78,219 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Boiled Indian Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Make the pudding

  1. Boil the milk.

  2. Scald the cornmeal in the hot milk and let it cool.

  3. Add the flour, chopped suet, molasses, salt, and eggs to the cooled mixture.

  4. Mix well and pour into a pot.

  5. Boil for three hours.

Serve

  1. Serve with maple syrup.

Recipe from a historical cookbook (Internet Archive).

Transcribed from a scanned cookbook and modernised for today's kitchens. Where the book gave no heat or time, or said "a moderate oven", the temperatures and times here may be modern equivalents rather than the book's own figures.

Explore the science

The flavor team

The pairs that carry this dish. Each one is judged two ways: how much their aromas overlap, and how often cooks already put them together.

  1. Milk + flourtop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Flour + eggtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together106,462 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Flour + molassestop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together10,429 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  4. Milk + eggtop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together88,785 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

  5. Milk + molassestop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together7,243 recipes

    Shared aroma: furaneol (caramel, strawberry).

Milk and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 78,219 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Cornmeal
Thickens the milk into a firm, spoonable pudding body as it cooks.
Eggs
Set during cooking to bind the pudding and add richness and structure.
Molasses
Adds deep sweetness and a dark color with a rich, caramel-like flavor.
Suet
Adds fat that enriches the texture and keeps the pudding moist.
Flour
Adds further body and helps the pudding hold its shape.
Milk
Forms the liquid base that the cornmeal cooks and thickens.

The step that matters

Scalding the cornmeal in the hot milk. Stirring the cornmeal into hot milk and letting it cool helps it hydrate evenly, so the pudding cooks smooth rather than lumpy or grainy.

“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.

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